Monthly Archives: May 2025

Brucciani’s, Morecambe

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Brucciani’s, Marine Road West, Morecambe

My friend John’s sixtieth birthday celebration was stylish and memorable – dinner in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, with the option of staying for the weekend in Art Deco splendour.

For me, the highlight was when we took his mother, Marjorie, for a morning cup of coffee at Brucciani’s on the seafront.

This celebrated and much-loved Italian milk bar is part of a family concern dating back to 1893 when Luigi Brucciani, aged thirteen, arrived with his family from Tuscany and settled in Barrow-in-Furness, across the bay from Morecambe.

Luigi’s son, Peter, opened the first of two Morecambe milk bars in 1932, followed by the current promenade location, almost next door to the Winter Gardens, the week before the start of World War II in 1939.

As war turned away the holidaymakers and killed the ice-cream trade, Brucciani’s prospered providing Italian coffee to military personnel.  After the war, when the holiday crowds and the ice cream returned, so did artistes at the Winter Gardens, including locally-born Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe (né Bartholomew), and Brucciuani’s grew from a milk bar to a café.

In July 2022, the then Prince Charles, as well as unveiling a plaque to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Winter Gardens, popped in to sample Brucciani’s ice cream.  He was served vanilla.

Luigi’s great-grandson, Paolo, speaks for his family at Spotlight on Bruccianis | Lancaster and Morecambe Bay.

Brucciani’s sells only their own ice-cream to an Italian recipe in more than a dozen flavours.  The décor has hardly changed, and is lovingly illustrated at Brucciani’s – Morecambe – Modern Mooch.

The Preston Brucciani’s, though it retains the name, has repeatedly changed hands since the 1970s:  Review: The historic Preston City Centre cafe that fails to live up to its potential | Blog Preston.

When John and I took his mother for coffee at Brucciani’s in Morecambe on a Saturday morning in January 2015, she said that she could remember the place when it first opened in September 1939. 

And, she declared, it hasn’t changed.

Sound café

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Sound Café, Isle of Man
Calf Sound and the Calf of Man (January 2008)

My friend John marks decennial birthdays in considerable style. 

For his fiftieth birthday, not long after he’d become a Manx resident, he hired the Sound Café, at the very tip of the island, and provided an entirely Manx buffet supper from lamb to queenies, so that guests from “across” (as Manx people refer to the other, larger island to the east) had the benefit of one of the finest of the many fine views around the island’s coast.

The café is a remarkable building, completed in 2002 to the designs of the Manx architects Kellett & Robinson.  It’s entirely unobtrusive in its magnificent setting, dug into the hillside with a grass roof, so that it’s invisible until you’ve walked past it.

It’s one of my favourite Manx places to eat and drink.

The panoramic picture windows look across to the other “other” island to the south, the Calf of Man, accessible with difficulty, despite its four harbours, because of the unpredictable waters of the Calf Sound, a treacherous stretch of water in which the current runs at up to eight knots.  (This didn’t dissuade a mid-nineteenth century owner, George Carey, a former London barrister, from attempting agriculture by swimming cattle across the Sound at low tide.)

Successive efforts to develop the Calf have had little success:  farming, lead mining and tourism alike failed, and in 1937 F J Dickens of Carnforth bought the island and presented it to the UK National Trust for preservation as a bird sanctuary.  It was leased to the newly-formed Manx National Trust in 1952, initially for twenty-one years, and is now vested in Manx National Heritage, and leased to the Manx Wildlife Trust.

The submerged Chicken Rock, 1½ miles south of the Calf, presented a hazard to shipping until the engineer Robert Stevenson built two lighthouses in 1818.  These were superseded by the Chicken Rock Lighthouse in 1875.  This was replaced with a new installation on the Calf in 1968, which was itself decommissioned in 2007:  Calf of Man.

The population in 1851 was 51, including four lighthouse keepers, but in the twenty-first century it is virtually uninhabited:  the wardens who maintain it as a wildlife sanctuary are resident between March and December, during which months the resident population is effectively two.

For the best of reasons, the Calf is not an easy place to visit:  Wayback Machine.  It’s much easier to chose a table at the Sound Café, and relax with a drink and a plate of Manx cuisine.


A brighter, purer and happier Sheffield

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The Victoria Hall, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

One of the admirable characteristics of the Methodist Church is its practicality.  As its name suggests, there is a methodical streak in its mission and its traditions, which impels its members to move with the times.

When Hugh Price Hughes’ Forward Movement prompted Methodists to attend to social care alongside individual faith, the Sheffield Wesleyan congregation looked at the four city-centre chapels and promptly knocked one down.

The Wesley Chapel, opened in 1780 by John Wesley himself, had become out-of-date and unsuitable for the church’s needs, so it was closed in 1906 and replaced by the magnificent Victoria Hall two years later.

Although £6,000 had been spent on refurbishing Wesley Chapel in 1875, its replacement cost £40,000 and the debt was cleared within three years.

The original design was by the short-lived Manchester practice of Waddington Son & Dunkerley, modified and completed by the Sheffield architect William John Hale (1862-1929).  The finished building is imposing, with an assertive façade and a huge tower with a baroque turret, built of brick and embellished with carvings by the brothers Alfred and William Tory.  When it was built it rivalled the other tall buildings in the city centre, the two town halls and the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches which are now both cathedrals.

Its main hall had three levels:  visitors entered from the street at circle level;  the floor of the hall was in the basement, and there was a balcony.  It was the best concert venue in Sheffield until the City Hall opened in 1932;  there are those that say it still is.  Significantly, the Hall was designed with spaces to serve a range of functions.

The first minister, Rev George McNeal (1874-1934), was recruited from the hugely successful Manchester and Salford Mission, and at the inauguration he made a landmark proclamation of intent. 

The Victoria Hall was to be –

  • a great evangelical preaching centre
  • the headquarters of a strong, vigorous and active Mission Church
  • a house of mercy in the centre of the city with an ever-open door
  • a people’s home, the social and religious centre of their thought and activity
  • a rallying ground for all kinds of philanthropic and religious enterprise in the city

His declared aim was to create “a brighter, purer and happier Sheffield”.  Immediately – and for long after Rev McNeal moved in 1924 – the Sheffield Mission responded practically to the needs of local people.

He founded the Sheffield Mission Labour Yard near the Wicker which provided 5,903 days’ work to unemployed men by June 1909, chopping firewood, cleaning, whitewashing.

During the First World War the Hall offered a transient refuge for forces personnel travelling through the city.

Three days after the first night of the Sheffield Blitz in December 1940, the Victoria Hall staged a scheduled performance of Handel’s Messiah, though almost all the surrounding buildings were wrecked.

From May 1941 to the end of the Second World War the Hall ran a Forces’ Rest Hostel which provided food and shelter to 80,000 servicemen trapped overnight by erratic train services.

Eventually the carefully designed and expensively built Victoria Hall became outdated.  Congregations dwindled so the place was taken apart.  In 1965-66 a floor was inserted in the main hall at circle level to create a separate space in the basement, while maintaining capacity for large audiences and congregations on special occasions.

Five shops were inserted into the building on Chapel Walk, providing scope either for commercial rent or mission activity.

In 2003 Ablett Architects designed a refurbishment to the shops that harmonises better with the Edwardian original.

And yet again, in 2015, The Foundry Sheffield, which leases the building from the Methodist Church, is refurbishing and repurposing the Victoria Hall while joining the newly founded Sheffield Charitable Network.